IV. Substance, Not Process
Constructivist teachers cheerfully accept that their most helpful role
isn’t one of direct telling and teaching.
Indeed, given the fundamentally internal nature of this deep learning,
teachers can’t help by presenting
rules, skills, or facts. Instead, they create a rich environment in
which the children
can gradually construct their own understandings.
—Best Practice, 2nd Ed.[1]
Be
a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.
—Progressive
aphorism
Pretty
words, pretty poison. While there are a number of online resources created both
for and by parent groups to expose the myth of “best practice” in
education (e.g. Educationally
Correct), most teachers are sadly unaware of the dogma-as-science attitude
that permeates today’s American education establishment from the very
top. New teachers can’t enter the profession without being inundated with
“best practice” ideology, and veteran teachers, swamped with the
day-to-day concerns of their jobs, don’t usually have the time or
resources to scrutinize what they’re told at professional-development
trainings. And so the word from
As
we pointed out in our Credo, modern Progressive
education is founded not on ideas originating in the academic disciplines of
mathematics, language arts, science, or history—it is founded on the
principles of psychology in general, and constructivist
psychology in particular. The constructivist school’s beginnings are
usually credited to Swiss researcher Jean Piaget, who, like Dewey, remains one
of the hallowed figures among Progressives. In Piaget’s words,
“…knowledge is a matter of constant, new construction, by its
interaction with reality…it is not pre-formed[2].” Piaget’s
constructivist philosophy (or epistemology, as he called it, meaning his
philosophy of knowledge) is complex and not without its remarkable, empirical
insights into child development. The gist, however—and the aspect most
seized-upon by Progressive educators—is constructivism’s belief
that human knowledge has no objective value or quality: there is no objective
truth beyond what every individual perceives “truth” to be in
his/her own mind and heart. For children, especially, knowledge is always under
construction (hence the name), and the goal of education should be to nurture
this process of “construction” without imposing any predetermined,
authoritarian interpretations (i.e. those of narrow-minded adults) onto the
precious developing child.
The
stress on the word “belief” above is important. There are other
schools of thought in the worlds of developmental and cognitive psychology that
don’t necessarily coincide with Piaget’s, such as B.F.
Skinner’s behaviorism, and which have also contributed sound empirical
research to our understanding of human development. So why are most of
Fine
and dandy, we might say. On some levels, constructivism appeals to the romantic
in all of us. Why, that’s just how I’d want my child to be taught! we might think.
It’s student-centered!
It’s authentic! It’s developmentally appropriate! And it’s so pretty! Now we begin
to see why the seductive, ethereal lingo deployed by educrats continues to
confound not just teachers but the American public at large. If you’re
not for constructivist education—if you’re an old-fashioned,
teacher-centered instructivist,
let’s say—you must be anti-child, and nobody wants to be associated
with hatred of children, least of all teachers and parents. And that, in turn,
is the reason why so many educrats can preside over asylums, rather than sane
schools, and get away with it, year after year. Might it also be the reason why
about half of all new teachers quit the profession within five years[4]? Consider the implications of
running a classroom, a large public school, or a large public school-district,
entirely under constructivist philosophy:
1. The student is not a passive
receiver of knowledge but an active constructor of it (therefore, no passive
sitting and listening to an adult; active movement and talking to one’s
classmates is better).
2. The teacher is not an authoritative
source of knowledge (apparently he/she is just a kind of glorified tour-guide).
3. The teacher is obligated to
structure learning and curriculum around student desires and interests (not
society’s greater interests).
4. The teacher is obligated to
implement constructivist, student-centered (not instructivist,
teacher-directed) “best practice” at all times, in every lesson.
5. The arbitrary imposition of rules,
order, and discipline are unnatural and incompatible with the cognitive
development of children.
Every
one of these logical deductions increases the odds against a teacher’s
overall ability to be effective, because it undermines the teacher’s
authority on every level (personal, professional, and intellectual) before the
eyes of students, and every one of them is a logical consequence of educratic
constructivist dogma. Take these and combine them with the extra demands placed
on teachers nowadays because of high-stakes testing under No Child Left Behind,
and you truly have a recipe for insanity. Who wouldn’t quit their job
under such self-defeating conditions?
It is a rich and terrible irony that although educrats disdain all external authority because of their constructivist beliefs, they have no problem at all overruling, infantilizing, and micromanaging teachers in the name of their own authority. Hence the fraudulent term “best practice.” It is fraudulent in at least two senses: lifted from the world of business management (as we’ve seen already, educrats are quite adept at misappropriating the ideas of others), it originally referred to standards of manufacturing and trade in various large-scale industries, such as steel-production and machine shops. Again, shall we stop to consider the irony? The same educrats who decry “factory model” schools have hijacked a factory-model term to further their silly ideals.
But
the second fraudulent aspect of the term “best practice,” as the
American educrat class applies it to teachers, is far more insidious: to the
layperson, parent, and unsuspecting new teacher, the adjective
“best” is a conversational dead end. That’s what superlative
adjectives do, after all; they rule out the possibility of anything being more
of, or better than, the nouns to which they’re applied. But remembering
that all Progressive ideology, to varying degrees, is founded on
constructivism, we come to another inescapable conclusion. The word
“best,” in this context, doesn’t mean what it normally does
to a layperson; it means what is “best” from the point of view of a
constructivist.
Consider
now the above passage from Best Practice (catchy
title!), by Zemelman and friends. First published in 1993 and now in its third
edition (2005), this jolly polemic is considered must-reading within the
education world these days, not only in colleges of education but at
school-campus in-services all over the country. The book purports to be a guide
on current state-of-the-art teaching in all the core disciplines—as
defined by numerous education think-tanks dominated by…well, do we even
need to tell you at this point? Our
point here is that the recommended pedagogy in the book Best Practice is presented to teachers as the scientifically proven
standard of teaching, when in fact it is the philosophically preferred
standard of teaching; but most teachers would never know or suspect that from
its contents because the philosophy of constructivism is never questioned. We
will delve into the truth behind most education “research” at
another point, but let it be noted here that even in its third edition, Best Practice continues to laud two
thoroughly discredited (but ideologically desirable) pedagogical gimmicks:
Whole Language and constructivist “new math” schemes such as the Connected Math Project (CMP) of
Michigan State University, Core-Plus, MathLand, and a dozen others. On that
score, the “new math” was implicitly repudiated by the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM)
in a November
2006 policy statement, largely as a result of public outcry from enraged
parents.
And
so both the term “best practice” and the book of the same name mean
nothing of the sort. Welcome to the world of American K-12 education, where up
is down, night is day, and dogmatized ignorance is considered the height of
intellect. And if we may beg the question just a little bit further,
let’s point out one more “best practice” education fallacy:
there can be no such thing as best practice in a constructivist’s world,
because there is no “best” anything, or “worst”
anything, for that matter. The absence of objective, absolute knowledge under
constructivist philosophy itself rules it out.
Try
pointing out these obvious absurdities to an educrat sometime. You will receive
a long frown and a raised eyebrow for your trouble. The mere laity (which
includes teachers, incidentally), doesn’t understand, is not equipped to
understand, and must therefore never
question the intellectual authority of educrats in these matters. If this
sounds like the sour grapes of a few embittered teachers, rest assured that
educrats regard parents and politicians with the same condescending disdain.
Such is the world of self-perpetuating delusion, arrogance, and pathology in
which
But
that brings us to the real issue: power. As a profession and an academic
discipline itself, pedagogy has never enjoyed much status or respect among the
more mature disciplines like medicine, engineering, law, etc. It should come as
no surprise that the pedagogues have long struggled to remedy this, but what
may be surprising is that in order for it to happen—in order for pedagogy
to attain its independence as a legitimate and authoritative field of
study—it must, in a paradoxical sense, somehow establish authority over
all the other disciplines. We’ve already noted that Progressive educrats
were already gravitating to the field of psychology as a potential source of
this authority as early as a hundred years ago. As educational historian (and
former Teachers College professor) Diane Ravitch states, “[At the turn of
the century] [p]rofessors of pedagogy saw themselves as reformers of a deeply
conservative field that needed to be liberated from tradition and guided by
modern science.…In colleges of education, the professors of psychology,
sociology, administration, and methods outnumbered ‘subject matter
specialists.’”[5] Constructivist psychology, with its
antiauthoritarian, “student-centered” ideals, has provided an
attractive (and ironic) path to authority for the educrat class—authority
over the academic disciplines, over teachers, and over parents who value
traditional education. That is why mere mastery of subject-matter doesn’t
impress educrats; that’s why someone holding a PhD from Harvard can be
driven from the profession (as we mentioned in Pillar
III) while a novice holding a bachelor’s degree in education but
without a major in any academic subject is welcomed. (In a related article,
Ravitch notes that only 39% of today’s K-12 teachers hold degrees in any
specific academic area.)
To
be sure, pedagogy has its place. But when it comes to the hiring and evaluation
of teachers, we believe that place must be secondary to mastery of
subject-matter—the substance of
what is to be taught in schools. The process of learning is important as well,
but as it’s defined by the current American educrat class, the process is
constructivist in nature and thus requires submission to other concerns, both
psychological and ideological, that are deemed more important than “mere
facts.” In Sane Schools, teachers draw their expertise directly from
authorities in their respective fields, not indirectly from authorities on
pedagogy. The substance dictates the process, not vice-versa. For example,
the principles of phonology and morphology (sounds and spelling), from which
the teaching of phonics as a basis of reading is drawn, originated in the field
of linguistics, the scientific study of language, which has contributed a vast
body of reliable empirical research to our general understanding of language.
The Whole Language movement, on the other hand, emerged from within the
pedagogue community, drawing selectively from linguistics and psychology both,
but only to the extent that these fields served the ideology of Progressive
educrats. In case you haven’t heard, in the ongoing war between phonics
and Whole Language, the principle of phonics as the most effective tool for
teaching beginning readers has won many times over—see, for example, the
report of the National
Reading Panel on this subject. In truth, the teaching of phonics to young
children is “best practice”—but don’t count on the
educrat class to tell you that, or even pedagogical think-tanks that presume to
tell subject-area teachers how to do their jobs, such as the National Council of Teachers of English (which
still shamelessly advocates Whole Language methods and opposes explicit
instruction in grammar and syntax) and the NCTM.
People
who’ve mastered an academic subject area already know what “best
practice” is, as applied to their field; they don’t need
pedagogical experts to micromanage and indoctrinate them. Progressive educrats
are always asking the question, “How would you like to be the patient of
a surgeon who was unaware of the latest procedures in surgery? Scary thought,
isn’t it?” Yes, it is. But this beloved canard of pedagogues ought
to be answered more often with another question: “How would you like to
be the patient of a surgeon who didn’t go to medical school, but a school
of pedagogy? Scary thought, isn’t it?”
Yes,
it is.
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Site contents copyright © 2007 by James O’Keeffe. All rights reserved. Contact: james@schoolsanity.com
[1] Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels
and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice: New
Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools. 2nd
Ed.
[2] As quoted from Geneva University
Archives: https://www.cs.tcd.ie/crite/lpr/teaching/cognitivism.html.
[3] Hirsch, E.D. Jr. The Knowledge Deficit.
[4] Issue
Brief: Teacher Attrition.
[5] Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School
Reform.